Author: Justin Lee

If there is one singular structure anywhere in this city that best personifies freelance writer, armchair architect and rabid chowhound Justin Lee, it need be Midtown’s Phoenix Financial Center. Affectionately referred to locally as the “punchcard building,” and iconified by local artists ad infinitum, this mid-century looker draws polarizing judgments on each end of the humanity spectrum. It encapsulates everything Lee adores and (constructively) loathes about the desert city in which he was proudly born and bred. Standing off-center but perfectly proud, easily not suburban, but never entirely urban, the PFC exists as a coda of what Lee believes to be Phoenix’s begrudging past mistakes, as well as its verging possibilities to come. Something unique to itself — something uncharacteristically Phoenix.

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